I'm really disappointed with you 1UP (but a little less now)

This was originally a comment I had written to an article that was up on the site earlier today called "A Brief History of Harware Disastors", written by Jeremy Parish. I was at work trying to comment from my iPhone and because 1UP is still broken, I was unable to post it. Unfortunately (or fortunately) when I got home to try and post from my PC, I could'nt find the story anywhere. So after a little digging I found that the article had been taken down. So I figure I'd post it here for y'all before I posted my comment so as to give you some context.
The article:
"A Brief History of Hardware Disasters
PSN's still offline, but it's hardly the first time disasters or incompetence have come between gamers and their entertainment.
By Jeremy Parish, 04/26/2011
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Sony's PlayStation Network has been down for about a week now, cutting off PlayStation 3 and PSP owners from a variety of services. This includes the ability to play the hotly anticipated Portal 2 online... a real head-slapper, since for some people the whole point of the game is its online co-op. But while Xbox 360 owners smile smugly and gloat about the rock-solid reliability of Microsoft's platform, we're less interested in kicking Sony while they're down (the rest of the Internet's already taking care of that for us). Instead, we'd like to look at the broader history of this sort of failure across the game industry.
The PSN outage isn't the first time a hardware company's screw-ups or simple bad decisions have come between fans and their games. Heck, it's not even the worst we've ever seen. So while you're fuming over your useless PS3 Internet connection and vowing never to buy another Sony product again, just remember that making and selling games is a complicated business fraught with troubles. Sony's not the first company to blow it, and they certainly won't be the last. This little disaster means they're in good company.

1988: Nintendo's Chip Shortages
Nintendo did a lot right with its first console; the Nintendo Entertainment System basically ruled the world throughout the late '80s. (Yes, yes, except Europe.) But even the mighty Nintendo wasn't perfect, and the NES market suffered from purported chip shortages that severely delayed the release of hot games like Zelda II for as much as a year. The full story behind these shortages has never been revealed, but for fans who waited as much as two years for the U.S. release of Zelda II and Super Mario Bros. 3, they were excruciating.


1992-1998: Nintendo Can't Get Their Peripheral Act Together
Nintendo saw huge success in Japan with the Famicom Disc System add-on that let customers buy cheap, high-capacity software in the 8-bit system's earliest days. Little surprise that the company planned to follow up with similar add-ons for its next two systems. The Super NES Play Station CD-ROM and Nintendo 64 DD were intended to expand their respective console's capabilities, but the former was cancelled due to alleged corporate shenanigans while the latter saw only a limited release in Japan. This left developers who had built games specifically for those platformers without a way to recoup their investment, while gamers who had been excited for the likes of EarthBound 2 were flat out of luck.

1995: Sega Lets Saturn Flop
Your opinion of the Sega Saturn will vary according to whether or not you were aware of the existence of import software. For some bizarre reason, Sega and its third parties declined to publish many of their best games in the U.S., allowing the console to languish while Sony stole its thunder with the PlayStation's amazingly diverse library. Saturn wasn't a bad console, it was just badly managed -- though the end result was the same either way.


2005: Microsoft's Red Ring of Death
The big one. The Red Ring of Death needs no introduction; it almost feels like a guaranteed death sentence on any Xbox 360 that launched before a given date, one practically guaranteed to kill your console right when you most want to use it. While the cause of the Red Ring has never been firmly established -- though the general consensus is that it's the result of component failure due to overheating -- it was a P.R. debacle for Microsoft for years and a major black eye for the Xbox 360's reputation.

2009: Sony's PSN Clock Troubles
If you experienced a sense of deja vu when PSN went offline, that's probably because this past week isn't the first time Sony's network service has gone dark. About a year and a half ago, the PlayStation 3's clock suffered a severe hiccup that caused systems to report a different time than PSN's official time and made any game that involved trophy syncing to be completely unplayable for several days. Ultimately, the issue appeared to resolve itself without any lasting effects, but it proved to be a valuable practice session for our current nerd rage."
Mycomment:
"I'm Really Disappointed With You 1UP
You've just admitted to publishing an article with the sole purpose of attempting to take the focus off of Sony and plant it squarely on the other hardware makers. This is just shameful. Sony is rightly the focus of attention right now because:
A) PSN has been totally offline for a week, which is hitting customers that pay for PSN+ or have purchased online only games squarely in the wallet and
B)they've allowed hackers o get a hold of not only our credit cards, but also our address, phone number, name, date of birth, etc.

But yet you want to write an article that says "this isn't a big deal, Nintendo had chip shortages and Micosoft had RRoD". Are you kidding me? Because of Sony's weak security, my entire lively hood could have been wiped out. Because of their weak security, shady people have all my info. Are you journalist or fanboys? Is it your job to look out for Sony or the end users?

And even your article is flawed because it leaves out things like the NES not reading carts or the PS1 needing to be turned upside down to play games or all the disk read errors of the PS2. And what about the PSP launch what with it's dead pixels and sticky square button. There are so many other examples for an article like this. It seems to me that the purpose of this article was to bring attention back to RRoD since the other events listed in the article are weak compared to other major events. As many others have pointed, you completely overlooked the whole PS2 disk read error debacle, which ended in a class-action suit that Sony settled out of court on. There are many more, but I think it's obvious what you guys were trying to do here. Microsoft really handled RRoD graciously by extending the warranty to 3 years on all consoles, something no other console maker has ever done. And Nintendo has always made very reliable hardware.
You guys were one of the main sites to go after Microsoft about RRoD, and rightly so, before they officially admitted that there was a problem and started replacing everyone's consoles. 1UP did countless articles on RRoD, yet here you are defending Sony when all of our information is out there in the wild because they were unable to live up to their end of the deal and protect their customers. If we were talking about anything other than a video game company there would be riots in the streets, but because of the extreme loyalty that gamers have, Sony get's a free pass, it's ridiculous. And to say that this isn't even the worst is outrageous. I'm sorry but I'd take a broken console over hackers having all of my information any day.

You guys really should be ashamed of yourselves for this article, because this isn't journalism. It's your job as game journalist to look out for we the consumers, not stick up for a corporation when they've rightly come under fire. Your supposed to asking the tough questions like, "how did this happen?", "why wasn't the system's security able to stop this?", or "why, after a week of downtime, are we just now being told that our credit cards and information could be compromised?". Instead your writing pieces that attempt to redirect attention off of Sony and on to Microsoft and Nintendo. And for what? To appease fanboys? This incident goes well beyond fanboyism and flame wars, we're talking about the consumers being stolen from because they apparently were wrong in trusting Sony with all their information.

As the title of my comment states, I'm really disappointed in you guys."
So as I pointed out earlier, 1UP has since taken the article down, which was the right thing to do. Although I'm sure that all the people calling them out in the comments section probably helped that decision along. So kudos to you guys for realizing that this wasn't good for the site's reputation.
In closing I just want to say that, I know there will be people that accuse me of hating Sony or something ridiculous like that, but that's simply not the case. Back in the day, before Microsoft righted the wrong that was RRoD, I wrote blogs ranting and cussing Microsoft over it. I also called their customer support line many times wearing out the people on the other end of the line. As consumers we have to stay on top of these corporations because at the end of the day their goal is to make money, whether that be at our expense or not. And that's why we need sites like 1UP to help us in doing that.
On a completely seperate note that early Playstation controller is crazy looking.